Enterprise customers, such as businesses, non-profits, governments, etc., continue to rely on information technology and network architectures as their communication and productivity infrastructure. With the continued increase in public network bandwidth and availability, these IT and network services may be provided by outside companies, which leverage shared resources and expertise to provide a greater cost-savings to subscribing customers.
These outside companies may provide Virtual Computing environments, which may include a virtual component for nearly every conceivable physical component. Virtual disks, virtual processors, virtual LANS, etc. All of these virtual elements may be run on large physical counterparts, capable of efficiently and cost-effectively serving multiple virtual version (e.g., multiple virtual machines may run on a single large server). Further, by servicing multiple customers, not only is the equipment more cost-effective (e.g., as compared to each customer purchasing smaller machines individually), but the total resources needed is reduced. While each individual customer would need to plan for peak usage, a shared system may need only prepare for the aggregate peak, which may be smaller by mismatches between peak usage. For example, time differences, demographic differences, product release timing, and any number of other things may allow one customer's peak to align with other customers' lulls, providing less variance in usage rates.
Thus, there exists a need in the art for greater distribution, greater virtualization, and greater efficiency in provisioning, maintenance, and customer control/management tools.